Carte blanche to Jean-Philippe Guérard | A brief history of hate

With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to novelist, playwright, actor and director Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.

When I was 11, I wanted to kill myself.

I was coming back from my intensive English class at the Saint-Édouard de Plessisville school, I was connecting to the Internet, and between researching Pokémon and Zelda, I was looking for the most effective and least painful way to end my days.

I was not a particularly unhappy child, but I was convinced that being gay made life unworthy of living. No one had told me that clearly, of course: I had deduced it myself, guided by outside contributors.

People like Jeff Fillion, for example. My bus driver at the time seemed to like him very much. It was CHOI who accompanied me to school for a good part of my primary and secondary school. It was unpleasant, of course, but I saw no reason to be indignant against an anthology of insults as poetic as qualifying a host of MusiquePlus as a “fat fag” who has “the ass so fucked up that it looks like a vulva “: it was part of life. The queers, they deserved to be insulted.

But a life spent being insulted, being diminished, being less than nothing, that didn’t interest me.

I’m not the only one: suicide is attempted or considered two to five times more among LGBTQ+ adolescents than in the general population^⁠1.

On several occasions over the years, Fillion has called his radio appearances “entertainment” to diminish their scope. My classmates had probably not received his memo on this subject: many had fun repeating at school what they had heard on the yellow bus. I remember a particularly unpleasant visit to GRIS, when I was in high school, where two workers simply had to receive judgments and insults while trying to keep a smile and during which I was looking for a way to disappear into the walls.

The summer between my 4^e and my 5^e secondary school, students chose to proudly wear the “Liberty, I shout your name everywhere” t-shirt and to travel the 100 kilometers that separate Plessisville from Quebec to take part in a demonstration in support of CHOI, whose CRTC had announced the revocation of the license, a decision that Reporters Without Borders described as “censorship”.

Other students instead chose to don “Racism is not a freedom” t-shirts, to denounce Fillion’s excesses. I only recently learned that there is also a “Homophobia is not a freedom” t-shirt. I wish I had seen someone wear it back then. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to. I have never positioned myself in this debate. I didn’t have the courage.

We know the rest of the story: CHOI was able to keep his license, but Jeff Fillion lost a lawsuit a few months later against Sophie Chiasson, who was suing him for defamation, and he ended up leaving CHOI on March 17, 2005, a few months before the end of my secondary school. For my part, I made a coming out absolutely non-event-driven (recommended by the very dynamic psychiatrist at my school, Madeleine, who insisted on being called Mado, a worker just as comforting and “kit-kat in the shake’n’bake” as Jocelyne de Radio Hell) and I have not, to my knowledge, been the object of homophobia until the end of my high school, at least not frontally.

Since then, everything has been fine in the best of all possible worlds: hatred no longer has a place on the airwaves and no one has experienced homophobia in Quebec.

Or not.

I was taken from flashbacks unhappy, last March, when I read the horrific story reported by the Quebecor media of Alex, the 10-year-old child who killed himself, in Outaouais^⁠2. Alex had adopted a new name, in tune with the questioning of her gender, and had identified as a lesbian to her peers. Victim of intimidation, Alex ended up ending his life.

Called to comment on the case by TVA Nouvelles, Françoise Roy, of the Quebec Association for the Prevention of Suicide, hypothesized that a child of this age is not able to understand that his gesture leads to death.

We’ll never know what Alex thought. And we know that suicide is multifactorial. But if I go back to my experience, almost at the same age as Alex, I know that I was fully able to understand how and why I had come to want to die: it was because he didn’t exist. a pill to become heterosexual. I dreamed of this pill because flamethrowers, from my point of view, indicated to me that the reverse was abominable.

I know that neither Jeff Fillion, nor my classmates who repeated his nonsense, nor Alex’s classmates wanted to lead LGBTQ+ people to suicide.

But you don’t need the intent to destroy to wreak havoc.

On the sidelines of the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, on May 17, TVA reported homophobic events in two schools in Estrie^⁠3. On the Pincourt side, near Vaudreuil, Néomédia reports that a student took down the pride flag hung in a common area of ​​the school before dozens of students rushed on it to trample it.^⁠4. The event was filmed. The video went around the web, bounced all the way to France. We hailed the “courage” of these young people who dared to brave the “propaganda” that was “shoved down their throats”. The intervention is framed within a debate on freedom of expression. And 20 years after the CHOI-Fillion saga, we must again explain that no, homophobia is not a freedom. And there are now, on all platforms, a thousand times more emulators even more radical than Fillion to ridicule, demonize, directly attack the LGBTQ+ community.

No one died from these events, of course. But one of the arguments that stands out a lot, when I inflict upon myself reading the enthusiastic reactions to Pincourt’s video, is that the rejection of the rainbow flag is a natural reaction to an overly publicized ideology. Gender diversity would take up too much space.

The 11-year-old Jean-Philippe could only have agreed with these comments. The 11-year-old Jean-Philippe would have told them that he is working hard to disappear. The 11-year-old Jean-Philippe would not have lasted long in this school.

I am 34 years old, fortunately.